Not the happiest book to start 2024 with, but it definitely makes an impression.

In episodic style Balsam Karam tells the story of two women in a fictional coastal city of a war-torn country, presumably somewhere in the Middle East, where rich tourists dine in fancy restaurants alongside struggling local refugees in the streets. One local woman desperately searches for her missing daughter who used to work in one of the restaurants. The other woman, visiting from Sweden on a business trip, is pregnant and later confronted with stillbirth.

The fragmented form and strangely sentences from which any unnecessary word has been removed, took me some pages to get used to, but ultimately worked very well, going straight to the heart of the matter.

Highly recommended.